


a hand to hold (the worst part is waiting)

by Shadaras



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Hospitals, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 12:53:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5870413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/pseuds/Shadaras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They bring him back half-dead, and that he’s unconscious is a mercy.</i>
</p>
<p>A story of how Rey stands vigil over Finn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a hand to hold (the worst part is waiting)

They bring him back half-dead, and that he’s unconscious is a mercy.

Rey helps Chewbacca patch Finn up once the _Falcon_ entered hyperspace, once there was nothing more to do but wait for the computer to say they were back at D’Qar, and maybe try and focus enough to start cataloging all the systems that needed repairs after the _(risky, terrifying, glorious, death-defying)_ harsh landing on Starkiller Base. Finn hadn’t lost any blood; lightsaber wounds were cauterized as they were made, and Rey thanks all her lucky stars (her heart ached as she thanked them, all the little dots of light she’d seen in the desert sky and never been quite sure of the proper names for, because star maps are useful but don’t tell you how to see them from the ground, and so she’d given them proper names and proper stories about the lives of people who lived in those solar systems so far away) for that one small blessing.

There weren’t many other blessings to be found, as they strap Finn in on his left side, so that none of his wounds would directly press against the bunk. Even unconscious, he could moan in pain, and Rey holds his hand as the _Falcon_ lands. “I wish I could see this for the first time with you,” Rey whispers, in the moments between the _Falcon_ stilling, its heart quieting from a roar to a murmur and a sigh, and Chewie coming to carry Finn out. “You understood my wonder, on Takodana, didn’t you? Nobody here will understand it.” She hesitated, and then kissed his forehead. “Be safe,” she tells him, words the only blessing she could give.

She doesn’t go to the infirmary immediately, though it tears at her heart to wait. There’s enough of an audience as it is. It’s too many people, and her instincts tell her to run, to hide in the _Falcon_ until everyone’s gone -- but they won’t leave, will they? D’Qar Base is their home, however temporary it may be, and she can’t ask them to leave or dissipate for her comfort alone. So Rey stays behind, and sees her pain echoed in the eyes of an older woman. She recognises her, from a holo she glimpsed in Han’s cabin on the _Falcon_ and from a story that BB-8 had told her about the kind General who had sent Poe to Jakku in the first place. General Leia Organa is a legend, Rey knows, but she’s also human, and she’s hurting, and looking at the _Falcon_ in the same way that Rey is watching Finn disappear.

Rey steps forward, uncertain, arms spreading slightly from her side, hands open. Leia Organa steps forward and pulls her the rest of the way into a hug that Rey never thought to need. It’s warm and it’s strong and Rey lets her face fall into Leia Organa’s hair and breathes in the soft, dusty, _green_ scent running through it. The general feels like sunlight, like an old tree; even as she’s bending, even as Rey can feel her trembling and her breathing shudder, she’s strong and she’s holding Rey up as much as Rey’s holding her up. “I’m sorry,” Rey says, her voice muffled. “I-- he...”

“He knew this could happen,” Leia says, and her voice is gentle, even as it’s rough with tears. “We said goodbye when he left. I had hoped...”

She doesn’t say what she had hoped, and Rey doesn’t ask.

They stand there until the crowd disappears, and then Leia leads Rey into the base itself. The cool tunnels are dark, and Rey shivers, following more closely behind Leia. It reminds her of the basement of Maz’s castle, and the halls of Starkiller Base. Dark and close aren’t good anymore, even if on Jakku they were the the Star Destroyers, wellsprings of survival and relief from the desert sun. She doesn’t say anything, but Leia steps to the side and reaches out, not even looking, and gently takes her hand. Rey holds onto it, a spot of warmth and calluses from work and weapons, things she could understand even in the midst of everything else she could not.

The place Leia takes her, it turns out, is the kitchens. Even with her stomach in knots, Rey knows better than to turn down the offer of free food. She takes fruits, and Leia and the workers tell her the names of every one, and where it’s from, and Rey almost forgets how much her heart hurts, with the fruit of seven different planets filling her mouth and running down her throat. She smiles, and thanks them, and then she remembers and the blue fruit in her mouth turns to sand on her tongue. “Can I see him?” she asks, quiet and intense, trying to hide how much it matters to her. _He came back for me,_ she doesn’t say. _I need to repay the favour. I need to keep watch over him._

“We can ask,” Leia says, and they bid the kitchens farewell, and Rey keeps better track, this time, of the paths they take. It’s better-marked than she thought, now that she’s paying attention. There are signs at every corner, tiny letters saying what’s down each hall. Leia doesn’t even glance at them, just walks purposefully, and faster than Rey would have expected of someone so small. _But then,_ she thinks, _she is not a normal person. She’s like a sandstorm, encompassing everything in its path and cleansing and polishing everything it doesn’t destroy._ The thought that follows startles her enough to stutter her step for a moment, give her pause: _I want to be like her, some day._

The quiet sense of power that emanates from Leia, sorrow kept tightly bound under duty and intent, means that anyone they run into just steps to the side and speaks or signs a quick greeting. Leia responds with a nod, a gesture, maybe a word -- and then they continue, without a break in stride. It’s remarkable. It’s something that isn’t the lonely darkness lit by glowstrips and speckled, sometimes, with little lights that are clearly trying to resemble stars and sometimes even succeeding. Rey admires the decoration; it makes the halls feel more like a home and less like a cave where something bad is going to happen to her. Or someone she cares about.

The medics tell her that she can see Finn, but they have him in bacta. A healing solution. It’ll help him, but he’s still unconscious, still needs time to heal.

“So I’ll wait,” she says, and sits down on the floor in front of the green-glowing bacta tank.

After a few minutes, someone shows up with a chair, and Leia takes her leave.

An hour later, a passing nurse hands her a datapad. Rey experiments with it, delighting in its speed and how responsive it is. It has access to practically all of the base’s datanet, and there are some simple games loaded on to it. She mostly just reads all the entries on the planet, the base, the Resistance -- learning anything she can about the people who decided that it was worth following her into ice and pristine, chemically-scented, hallways, just on the faith of a man she’d barely known and an old legend who died saving her.

Rey wonders, as she watches Finn floating in the bacta, the wound on his back still raw and dark in the unsettling blue light, if the General thinks it was worth it, to lose her husband in rescuing her.

Three hours later, Leia and some of her staff debrief her. Leia doesn’t even ask her to move somewhere else, just takes her terse report about her experiences on Takodana and Starkiller Base. The General’s face is drawn and pale, and her body unnaturally still. The sense of power that echoes around her deepens, darkens, and Rey says, when Leia at last sends her staff away, “You feel like he did, when I first woke up.”

Leia looks at her, and now the pain on her face is wrought in the deep lines around her eyes, in her forehead, around her mouth. “You think I don’t know that?” she says, and Rey hears the tears that tore at her throat, sees the wetness glistening in her eyes, the almost-hidden tracks of salt on her cheeks. “We have always been closer than either of us like to admit.”

Rey looks down. There is a world in Leia’s voice that she simply cannot understand.

“We will do what we can for your friend,” Leia says, and her voice is gentler, her power softer. “He was brave.”

“He is,” Rey says.

Leia touches her shoulder briefly as she leaves, and the feeling lingers, a mix of pain and regret that Rey doesn’t want to think about. She doesn’t cry, can’t cry; crying wastes water that she never had to spare, and even on this planet with forests and rivers, she doesn’t want to forget those hard-earned lessons just yet.

So instead, she sits, and she waits, and she reads, obsessively, endlessly, until she falls asleep in the chair. She wakes on a pallet, the room dark except for the gentle blue glow of the bacta tank. Rey turns and looks at Finn, still floating there, face lax and body still except for the slow in and out of his chest as he breathes. She watches him, watches the blinking light on the monitor that represents his heart, until she falls asleep again, and this time doesn’t wake until it’s morning and the medical staff returns.

Rey waits for three days.

She doesn’t leave the medical wing. She barely leaves Finn’s room. The medical staff start talking to her when they bring her lunch on the first day, telling her about their work and their lives. Rey listens, and asks questions, and makes them tell her everything that’s happening with Finn. She learns that they’re keeping him unconscious with other drugs; the bacta doesn’t do that itself. The bacta itself soothes and encourages cell repair, and is in some ways used by the body as a base for cellular regeneration, and it’s only successfully produced in one star system, and best from one planet.

On the third day, in the middle of the afternoon, they decant Finn. He’s still unconscious. They aren’t trying to keep him that way anymore, one of the nurses tells her that evening. He just suffered a huge shock, and his body wants to protect him as he heals. Even if the bacta helped, it can only do so much, and it’s done everything it can, now. It’s up to him now.

“He’s strong,” Rey says, and she sits by his side and holds his hand and reads to him from her datapad, telling him about planets that she’d never heard of, places that maybe someday they’ll be able to visit.

A pilot visits, Commander Poe Dameron. He tells her about how Finn rescued him from the First Order, and Rey laughs, shaking her head, because of course that’s how he became part of the Resistance; half by accident and entirely because of his heart. She doesn’t tell Dameron about how Finn rescued her. She doesn’t tell Dameron about what happened on Starkiller Base. She tells Finn, when it’s just them again, her voice cracking, that he’s lucky to have made such a good choice in who to rescue.

It’s a week later when General Leia Organa asks her to help retrieve Luke Skywalker.

It’s two days after that when Rey says _Yes_.

“Waiting isn’t helping anything,” she tells Finn’s unconscious body. “Dameron says he’ll watch over you, and I need to do something. Maybe Luke can help. If the Force can reach inside someone’s mind, maybe he can help you wake up.” She leans down and kisses his forehead. “I’ll be back,” she promises him.

And she turns, and she walks away, and she closes her eyes to keep from shedding any tears.

Leaving his room is the hardest thing she’s ever done.


End file.
